So after spending some time doing my year end stats I was once again thinking about the journey I’ve made over the last 15+ years of writing.
I’ve seen several other writes this year get hit with bans or deletions from various platforms and so I thought it was time to write down my thoughts on the subject.
So let me say this as clearly as I can:
If you don’t own the platform you’re posting on, you don’t own your content
Yes, every platform says you retain full ownership of your content, but that’s not really true when they can kick you off their servers and not even give you access to the content you spent years making.
Self hosting is the only way you get to retain control of your content*
*That’s 90% true, the remaining 10% is the reality that you’re probably still hosting on someone elses servers, just not their platform. But even if you were to truly self-host your servers, you’ll still be renting an internet connection from someone.
But, self-hosting gives you the control to backup, export, and move your content at any time without having to worry about what strange format it might be in, or if you’ll be denied access at the whim of someone else.
You use other services, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?
I use four services; Tumblr, BDSMLR, Literotica, and DeviantArt. I also post to mcstories.com, but I don’t really consider that a service 🤷.
You’ll notice that I post everything on thehandsthatlead.blog and the link to it (where possible) on the other services.
BDSMLR could go away at any time, and there is no export option available. If you’re on BDSMLR or any other service that doesn’t let you backup your content, you’ll be in for a bad time when it eventually collapses.
I use to only post on Tumblr, all my content was there, until one day they just up and decided that adult content was no longer in their business plan and banned it. When I rejoined, I started posting only links back to my blog. At least they let you export your content, if you’re on Tumblr, I’d be backing up at least once a week.
Literotica is weird. I had a story in the queue to be reviewed for weeks without it moving forward, but I submitted it the same day as a second story and that story has already been posted, and it just got rejected today for effectivly petplay. I’ve had another story rejected because the reviewer didn’t think it had a happy ending for the main character 🤔
All of these services could go away tomorrow and I’d lose nothing but the followers/likes that they host. All my content would still be on my blog.
Isn’t self-hosting expensive?
Not really, I’m running thehandsthatlead.blog on a base tier of a shared hosting plan that cost $94 (all prices in USD) for three years and included the first year of the domain name.
That works out to about $2.50 a month for hosting (assuming $10 for the domain name for the first year) for the first three years, then it will go up to $6 a month.
I splurged on my domain name, .blog is expensive in comparison to other more common domains, so that costs an extra $25/year. If i’d wanted to go with just a .com or .net or something, that would have only been $10/year.
Isn’t self-hosting complex?
No, you can get completely managed WordPress hosting where all you really have to do is write your content.
Of course you can make self-hosting as complex as you like 😉
I’ve got another post coming up tomorrow on my WordPress setup.
What about adult content?
When selecting your hosting provider you do have to read their terms of service (ToS) carefully. Pick one that explicitly says that adult content is allowed.
I’m using DreamHost, which does so, but even if they change, I can just pull the backup of my entire site and get it up and running in under an hour somewhere else.
My general practice for backups is to pull down a copy of the SQL and files at the start of the month, and then just sync the latest changes after I’ve added any posts by the built in WordPress export feature.
Other Benefits
Beyond the obvious, you get other benefits to self-hosting as well:
- Standard data model, you’re going to be using something like WordPress, that has a standard data model to it and is well understood. Moving between providers or porting to another CMS is going to be easy.
- BACKUPS! Any service provider worth their salt is going to give you backups that you can download at any time.
- Customization, as much of it as you want. Most services, like Tumblr/BDSMLR/etc. really don’t give you much in the way of customization, in fact the majority of the content is probably consumed in a timeline of some kind. Self-hosting lets you customize your readers experience to your hearts content.
- Features, much like above, want a feature that doesn’t exist on your current service, no problem, WordPress has a huge selection of free features.
Closing Thoughts
So I hope I’ve at least made you think about your data and the services you use. Even if you don’t run your own blog or do any writing, you probably have data that someone else has pretty much total control over (where’s your e-mail account, got any kind of social media, where are your files stored… Google, Microsoft, Apple?).
The new year is a good time to take some time and consider what that really means.
